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Intel Begins EOL Plan for Xeon Phi 7200-Series ‘Knights Landing’ Host Processors
- rbanffy 8y agoWell... It's not to be expected the old processors would remain available after the introduction of their improved successors.
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoWhat newer HPC product is replacing this? It seems like the Phi might be dead end, at least for the foreseeable future.
- rbanffy 8y agoIt's the Knights Mill family - https://ark.intel.com/products/series/132784/Intel-Xeon-Phi-72x5-Processor-Family https://ark.intel.com/products/series/132784/Intel-Xeon-Phi-...
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoFor deep learning applications, not general HPC (at least, from what I understand). Is anyone actually using these and finding them better than GPUs?
- rbanffy 8y agoBoth have AVX512 with, AFAIK, similar performance. The Knights Mill ones may have some extra extensions for lower precision floating point vector ops. The newer ones also have much better IO capabilities and virtualization.
- martinpw 8y agoKnights Mill has only half the double precision performance of KNL. So not really a successor, more heading off in a different direction.
- Uberphallus 8y agoI hate how the "Deep Learning optimized" actually means "you don't really need all that precision in the activation function of your neurons anyway".
- desertrider12 8y agoNERSC's Cori machine is the biggest machine of Knight's Landing (10,000 nodes), 10th on TOP500. Don't know of any planned Knight's Mill machines. Generally, Xeon Phis get fewer FLOPs than GPUs but are better at certain tasks, e.g. graph algorithms with lots of divergent control flow. Also it's possible to run pure MPI programs on them and get decent performance, and there's a lot of pure-MPI HPC software out there.
- wickberg 8y agoIn terms of KNL deployments, LANL's Trinity system (#9 on June 2018) is slightly larger. Trinity has 9,984 KNL nodes, vs 9,688 in Cori.
- desertrider12 8y agoYep, I missed that one.
- eksu 8y agoIntel has GHC (Haskell) running on these in-house if I recall correctly.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wyldfire 8y agoI think Phi is targeted at workloads like scientific fortran applications that no one could be bothered to redesign to take advantage of OCL/etc style programming models. They're 'better' than GPUs in that you can still use x86 and you're not stuck between the current choices: abusive-market-leader and low-quality-deliverables.
- kev009 8y agoThese seem pretty insane, you'd be better off with two POWER9s in just about any dimension including cost, TDP, thread count, cache, memory bandwidth, I/O bandwidth including PCIe lanes, FLOPS and integer performance.
- acqq 8y agoCan you please elaborate? How do you come to such a conclusion? I'd like to read some realistic comparison which would demonstrate the results in both cases, compared to the power consumed.
- kev009 8y agoYou can validate pricing on https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html. I am one of the first buyers with a dual 22 core system, so I'd be happy to run any numeric benchmarks if people have ideas. Basically you get 88 threads per socket, generally will have "bonus cache" (this is a 24-core die so you get free cache if the fused off cores are not adjacent) so 120MB per socket, much higher clock speed, rediculous I/O bandwidth to PCIe 4.0, CAPI and NVLink. The speeds and feeds are simply higher than anything intel has been able to muster to market. If you have enough volume, getting the La Grange POWER9 CPU Google and Rackspace are using would be even better than the Sforza Raptor's Talos II uses -- that gets you 8 DDR4 channels. I know basic pricing rumors and it is good.
- ksec 8y agoDo you know if SuperMicro are going to have any POWER9 systems? ( I think they had announcement but there are no information on their webpages ) Given the insane amount of bandwidth, I wonder if Netflix will use this for their Open Appliance. If we are sticking to x86 it looks like we have to wait till Zen3 from AMD to get something equivalent, that is 2019 or 2020.
- dragontamer 8y agoWait, what's wrong with EPYC? EPYC 7601P is 32-cores for roughly $2200 or so. And unlike Power9, the motherboard is "only" $550 or so (Power9's cheapest motherboard is like $1000 from Raptor Talos II Lite). From what I've seen, EPYC roughly has the same Monero-mining speeds as Power9. All other benchmarks are in favor of EPYC, as x86 optimized code (Z-lib, H264, Apache, Postgres... etc. etc.) doesn't perform as well on Power9. Power9 scales higher, but that gets cost-prohibitive. I think the typical person will only buy computers that cost less than $15,000 (Dual EPYC 7601 / SuperMicro system / 256GB of RAM)
- jcranmer 8y agoIntel is building out a exascale supercomputer for 2021 based on ... something. The architecture is under very tight wraps, so it's all up to speculation, which generally seems to lean towards GPGPU (a more traditional one than Xeon Phi at least) or some sort of FPGA. So something is likely to come out to replace the Xeon Phis, we just don't know what it is yet.
- rbanffy 8y agoI would bet they are using something similar to the Xeon Phi, perhaps with more external memory channels and larger per-core caches. Maybe some PTX-like matrix operations and wider vector units. I'm sure Intel is doing a ton of homework investigating what is actually being used and what are the bottlenecks in current Intel users in HPC.
- biztos 8y agoNice to see Yolo County get some love. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Landing,_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Landing,_California
- biztos 8y agoI didn't expect upvotes for this but I'm surprised by the downvotes. Anybody care to tell me what's wrong with commenting on the name of the processor series when that name is in the headline? (And Knights Landing is a lovely little place which most people who aren't from Northern California may never have heard of. Worth a visit, especially if you fish.)
- adwn 8y agoBecause it's off-topic. Same as commenting on Java the island on an article about the JVM. (I didn't downvote you, though)
- Jweb_Guru 8y agoThat's really sad, I always wanted to get my hands on some of these. For certain tasks (that work poorly on GPUs in the same cost ballpark, particularly ones that require large amounts of local memory bandwidth) they had rather excellent price / performance ratios. But I guess that didn't coincide with what people wanted.
- shaklee3 8y agoThe tools killed it. By all accounts it was terrible to program for. It wasn't as simple as writing a standard x86 piece of software.
- TheCondor 8y agoWell, for good performance, no it’s not like your desktop. The first generation or two were more like packaging experiments, like a toolkit for developing specialized silicon parts. Like things you’d sort of prototype on a phi and then build custom silicon for and if you used intels custom shop, maybe your firmware would be done. Or something like that. That is my guess, I think if I was intel, I’d be thinking of ways to corner the custom accelerator market as that’s where it looks like things are going. Phi lacked fpga type stuff though. I think the deep learning stuff really took over though and people wanted phis for other things that it just doesn’t fit. It’s an even more odd looking beast through those lenses.
- shaklee3 8y agoIntel's problem has always been the libraries in the hpc world. Nvidia understood this early on, and they dumped an ungodly amount of money into getting people onto their platform by investing in libraries and tools. Intel thought that by just releasing a card with a bunch of Xeon cores and not a whole lot of accompanying Library support would do the trick. Their mkl library is a good example of that. There are a bunch of different ways/libraries to accomplish the same task, and it's not always clear which to use. Further, the documentation is basically just an API printout with very few examples. You can't rely on stackoverflow to document things for you. This isn't unique to Intel either. I'm looking at you AMD. It wasn't until recently that rocm started picking up steam and amd realizing is important -- long after their Enterprise GPUs were out.